Press release distribution service standards template

This framework for press release distribution service standards starts with an event the responsible party controls. A standard should not promise press coverage, readership or business effect. For one England announcement, write separate measures for the buyer newsroom, manual outreach, technical transmission, paid placement and monitoring. Leave every target blank until the buyer has a justified requirement and the supplier has accepted it in the contract.

What to take away

Complete the measure card

Use the following fields for each standard:

Do not combine unlike populations. A submission count cannot be the denominator for newsroom correctness. A monitoring query result does not measure whether journalists read anything. An independent publication is an observed outlet event, not a supplier service-level success.

Define clock pauses narrowly. A pause should have an observable start, reason, approving owner and restart event. If a supplier waits for buyer evidence, record which evidence was requested and when it arrived. Otherwise the elapsed-time measure cannot distinguish delivery work from an unresolved buyer dependency. State the timezone at every boundary.

Standards for controllable work

For source approval, the event could be "all claims in source-copy version [ID] have an evidence owner and recorded decision". The population is the claims register, not every sentence. Any threshold stays blank until the buyer decides whether less than complete evidence is ever tolerable. For high-risk claims, the stop rule may require specialist review rather than an averaged score.

For technical transmission, use the supplier's exact status term and contractual definition. Record rejected, duplicated and corrected units separately. A fast accepted status still says nothing about indexing, syndication, editorial use or readership.

Embargoed releases need their own standard in both the transmission and the outreach lane, because an early release is a failure the supplier controls. A populated card for that standard could read:

In the outreach lane, the same card applies to journalists who receive the release under embargo: the population is the approved contact set, and the evidence is the send record showing the embargo line in the subject and body.

The media list itself needs an accuracy standard. Define the event as a contact record that has a named source, a verification date and a current outlet, and record bounced, moved and objecting contacts separately so the list is corrected before the next send.

For paid placement, specify the controlled page, approved label, version, visibility period and correction route. CAP's recognition rules address identification of marketing communications within their remit. Rule 2.1 of the CAP Code, which the ASA enforces, states that marketing communications must be obviously identifiable as such, so the approved label belongs in the measure card. Applicability remains a qualified advertising and legal decision.

For contact handling, define the eligible approved set, suppressions applied, failures and objections routed. The ICO's business-to-business marketing guidance distinguishes recipient categories and channels. It is UK guidance under DUAA review, not a universal permission statement. The two instruments behind it are the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), which set the rules for electronic marketing, and the UK GDPR, which the ICO says applies to personal data processed for direct marketing even in a business context. Under the Data Protection (Charges and Information) Regulations 2018, organisations that use personal information need to pay a data protection fee to the ICO unless they are exempt, so the contact-handling card should hold the supplier's ICO registration reference as evidence.

Security and incident measures

An incident measure needs the event, severity method, clock, evidence source, notification route, containment owner and recovery condition. NCSC's supplier assurance questions support checking contractual reporting and continuity responsibilities. Its incident-management guidance supports preparing response decisions before pressure. Neither provides an industry response-time benchmark for announcement services.

Failure and review

Write remedies against the controlled failure: rework a version, quarantine contacts, disable a route, correct a placement, repeat an authorised test, export evidence or exit. A credit may address payment but cannot cure missing rights, privacy, accessibility, security or factual authority.

Review the standard when the service edition, endpoint definition, contract, data flow, owner or evidence query changes. Preserve old definitions so trends are not manufactured by a denominator change. Named commercial, procurement and specialist reviewers must approve populated targets before they become operational commitments.

At each review, reconcile exceptions against the denominator and inspect excluded cases rather than assuming the exclusion rule worked. Retire a measure when its event can no longer be observed consistently. The retirement record needs an owner, date, reason and replacement, with no backfilled trend unless the old and new definitions are genuinely comparable.

Before you act

Common questions

Why should targets remain blank in a service standard?

Targets stay blank until the buyer has a justified requirement and the supplier has accepted it in the contract. This prevents benchmarks from being imposed without a controlled event or agreed tolerance. Named commercial, procurement and specialist reviewers must approve populated targets before they become operational commitments.

How should clock pauses be defined?

A pause should have an observable start, reason, approving owner and restart event. If a supplier waits for buyer evidence, record which evidence was requested and when it arrived. Otherwise the elapsed-time measure cannot distinguish delivery work from an unresolved buyer dependency. State the timezone at every boundary.

What should a failure action include?

Write remedies against the controlled failure: rework a version, quarantine contacts, disable a route, correct a placement, repeat an authorised test, export evidence or exit. A credit may address payment but cannot cure missing rights, privacy, accessibility, security or factual authority.